Folklight's Story

Folklight's Story

Folklight Film Club started with a visit to Brooklyn, a harvest at a winery, a drive down Bohemian Highway, and a big question.

The idea of Folklight Film Club began to form for Executive Artistic Director Brooke Tansley in the months after a 2013 visit to a childhood friend and filmmaker in Brooklyn, who lamented that it felt impossible to create a life as "a normal, modest, American middle-class" filmmaker.

In 2015, on a drive down a beautiful Sonoma County road, after spending most of the previous year working in the wine industry, Brooke wondered if she could use the wine club model to make movies instead. She had seen that the values inherent in good winemaking - art with science, honing a craft, and facilitating shared moments and quality time between people - were the same reasons she had become an artist and storyteller.

She wondered, "If I were suddenly gifted the technology of moving pictures, how would I use it? How would I create an industry of it, had the one we have now never existed?"

Together with inspiration from movements and cultures that have flourished in Sonoma County - farm-to-table, slow food, local food, artist colonies, sustainable farming and biodynamics, and Miwok and Pomo storytelling traditions - these questions sparked this unique opportunity to create a parallel entertainment industry, grounded in a more constructive and loving set of values. Wine Country values. A focus on community and quality time.

Storytelling is a worldwide prehistoric tradition that served to bring communities closer together through the passing on of shared stories, wisdom, and values. With the development of the motion picture, this beautiful tradition became something to serve the wants and wallets of a select few. Beginning here in Sonoma County and inspired by wine country values, Folklight Film Club will open chapters in communities all over our country, creating an industry that gets back to storytelling's roots in strengthening the bonds of a local community through our shared stories, wisdom, and values, making communities - each person in them - and quality time spent together the focus of Folklight's work.

Either through membership, donation, sponsorship, or artistic collaboration, you are invited to join this movement.

Let's do something new together.

Photos from the set of Take Care, shot in 2010 in Los Angeles, primarily at Brooke's house, written and directed by Scott Tanner Jones, cinematography by Armando Ballesteros, starring Ryan Driscoll and Elise Ivy. Brooke was an associate producer and played a supporting role.